


¿Cómo ve con los ojos cerrados?

by Hoodoo



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Backstory, Citadel of Ricks, Cybernetic Implants, Explicit Language, Eye Trauma, Gen, Surgical complications, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-28 05:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13897233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoodoo/pseuds/Hoodoo
Summary: Eyepatch Rick from the SEAL Team didn't always have an eyepatch and wasn't always part of the team. So how did he end up there?





	1. Chapter 1

He remembered the heft of the weapon. The faint brush of fabric on fabric as he moved into position, and the sun beating down too hot, and the grit in his nostrils. He remembered seeing his buddy Smitty crouch into place, in his right peripheral vision. A gnat buzzed annoyingly near his ear, sounding too loud for a miniscule insect, but he didn’t brush it away.

Target confirmed.

Without moving his hand from his own rifle, Smitty flicked a finger forward.

The signal.

Rick remembered hurtling forward—he was point, it was his position, he loved being the first—weapon hot, finger tightening on the trigger, the gnat gone but shouting from the squad taking its place—the target was in his sights and automatically, from muscle memory, his forefinger pulled the trigger of his assault rifle—

He remembered the kick of the gun into his shoulder, and a flash that looked like someone took a shard of a mirror and reflected the sun into his eyes.

Then all he could remember was the agony ratchetting more and more inside his head, and it all went black.

⁂

Then bits and pieces:

“Medic! I NEED A FUCKING MEDIC!”

“Man down, repeat, man down, lock on to my signal—“

“Sanchez, Sanchez—you hear me? You hear me, man? You stay with me— _WHERE’S THE GODDAMN MEDIC?!”_

In waves that alternated dark and much too bright, Rick struggled to understand what was happening. 

“D-did we get him?” he asked, in a voice that didn’t sound anything like his own; it was cracked and weak and was associated with more pain than he’d ever felt before. 

Smitty’s face came close to his, but remained blurry. 

“Yeah man, you got him. You got that fucker—“

Rick tried to smile but it felt like the side of his head was melting off.

“G-guess you owe me. You know I-I-I like Cuban cigars and, and—“

“Anything you want man, but you gotta stay with me! Sanchez, you stay with me—”

Why was Smitty pleading? Where those tears on his cheeks? He was a real comedian, oughtta earn a nomination for best actor, pretending his friend was dying—

Rick dropped back into unconsciousness with the noise of an incoming chopper and the echoing of Smitty’s screaming at him in his ears. 

⁂

He woke up but was blind. 

He was woozy.

He was scared.

He tried to call out, to yell, to demand answers, but his throat was too parched. He managed a croaky little squeak.

He was pulled under by the unrelenting drag of drugs again.

⁂

He woke up again.

“Sanchez. You’re awake.”

Was he? He was still blind. He was still dizzy. He tried again to speak and was still unable.

“Rick Sanchez, dimension 707, I’m here to inform you you of your option to be transferred off planet to the Citadel. Relocation can commence in two day’s time.”

Transfer? He was being transferred? Why? He’d done his job, he shouldn’t be taken from his squad! They worked well together, they got their assignments done, he’d been commended and medaled—

Whoever was telling him this sighed in annoyance. “Since you’re still whacked out on morphine, I will return tomorrow with the appropriate forms. Good day, 707.”

—and what was this 707 shit? He’d never heard those numbers in his life. And . . . and off _planet?_ The Citadel? What the fuck was going on—

Rick struggled to ask even one question, but before he could force his vocal cords to work, the room felt empty and he intuitively knew he was alone again. 

⁂

The next day he wrestled against the drug-induced sleep and won.

His head was heavy and felt thick; carefully, because of all the tubing he could feel weighing his arms down, he felt at it. The callouses on his fingertips caught on the bandaging he’d been wrapped in. The right side of his head hurt so badly, and his left eye was gummed shut. He picked at the gooeyness in his eyelashes until he could at least crack that eye open.

He was in a generic hospital bed. Monitors displayed his vitals and made soft noises near him. Tubes ran into his arms, itchy button electrodes were stuck to his chest. His dick burned. When he gingerly picked up the sheet with a weak hand, he saw he’d been catheterized. 

He moaned a little, and let the sheet drop again. 

“G-good. You’re awake-you’re conscious again.”

The announcement startled him and he jerked, which rocketed sharper pain through his skull. He cried out.

“Take it easy, 707. No need to get-to work yourself up.”

Gritting his teeth, Rick managed to crank his left eye open again. 

He was standing at the side of his bed. 

Not exactly him, though. Another guy who looked like him. Had the same wiry build. The same critical expression that Rick saw when he looked into a mirror, the expression like everything around him was just a little less than he expected it to be. 

But he was different enough: wrong hair, wearing glasses, holding a clipboard.

It was so confusing and disorienting.

“Who the fuck are y-you?” Rick rasped. 

“Rick Sanchez, dimension 2246-B. Field agent for the DRR, the D-department Recruitment and Relocation, Citadel of Ricks. And you’re—“ the doppelganger glanced at his clipboard and lifted a paper. “—Rick Sanchez, dimension 707. F-formerly highly commended and metaled Navy SEAL before that unfortunate dishonorable discharge on charges of murder in the first degree. That will lead—it will lead to an unfortunate tailspin of your life, which culminates in you giving a blow job to the barrel of a gun. When it shoots its wad, you’re fucking d-dead.”

If it was possible, the pain in his head subsided while his brain, on its roller-coaster, tried to sort out this information. It couldn’t quite do it. 

_“What?”_ Rick hated that his voice had shrunk to mouse sized.

The man at the side of his bed looked at him from over the tops of his glasses. 

“I can s-s-ee you’re confused.”

“You’re fucking r-right I’m confused!”

“First you, you, you have to understand that time travel isn’t possible, 707. What I t-told you was conjecture. Pretty fucking good conjecture, but an assumption-a guess nonetheless. It is of course your ultimate decision to be relocated to the Citadel, but from one Rick to another—“

Here he leaned in close. 

“—take this fucking chance. Your life here is going straight down the goddamn toilet, and you’re gonna be swimming in shit in a very short time.”

_tbc..._


	2. Chapter 2

As much as it pained him a little to do it, Rick begged Rick to explain. To please help him understand what the hell was going on.

The Rick who appeared in his room sighed and checked his watch. Then he sighed again and looked around for a chair. As he pulled one up closer to the bed, he said without hiding his annoyance,

“You’re l-lucky it’s been a little slow lately, asshole. I don’t have time to spoon feed-to coddle every R-rick who’s assigned to me.”

Rick tamped down his knee jerk reaction of meeting irritation with irritation and expressed his gratitude.

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. You gonna owe me a fifth of vodka,” Rick grumbled.

Then he launched into an explanation that made much less sense than Rick was hoping for. He wanted something simple: “This was a mistake,” or “You’re still under the influence of some heavy-duty drugs and this is all a madcap hallucination,” or even, “You’re dead, welcome to hell.”

What he got was an accurate, unnerving account of his life leading up to this point, told by someone in a disassociated voice, like it was boring and he couldn’t give two shits. 

Occasionally, though, a nugget of information made no sense, and even though Rick tried not to interrupt because it made the other Rick sigh dramatically and threaten to leave him to his misery, he couldn’t help it.

“What do-do you mean, no Diane? Who is-who the fuck is Diane?”

“In this dimension, you never met Diane. Which means no B-beth, and subsequently, no M-m-morty,” Rick said in a voice that indicated he was sure he was dealing with the mentally handicapped. “That’s why you joined the Navy, and were able to stick with it so long—“

“I knew a Diane in college—” Rick recollected. In the far reaches of his memory, he saw her: blonde, freckles, laughing with her friends walking across the quad—

“Right, but you never hooked up with her-got with her, idiot! Jesus.”

Rick wondered but didn’t dwell on who the hell Beth and Morty were.

_“No Diane,”_ the other Rick repeated, as if one final reiteration would cement it. “I don’t hear you bi-bitching about not understanding the goddamn Flesh Curtains, so dr-drop the goddamn Diane thing!”

Some of the words in that sentence made even less sense—what in the hell was “Flesh Curtains”?!—but his head was pounding so he didn’t even try to ask about it.

His twin paused, looked over the tops of his glasses to see if Rick had any further inane comments, then continued, ticking facts off with his fingers. “So you got your degrees. Joined the Navy. Got high scores in marksmanship—set a naval boot camp record, right? They had a hard time deciding whether to set you up in research and development—did you know that? Higher ups thought you’d be excellent in their experimental weaponry program, and they would’ve been right—or put you in the field. 

“Eventually they figured they needed more grunts and they could always pull you into a desk job later. You pushed and they pushed back, and you pushed harder, and made it through SEAL training. You were good. Real good. Which is expected; Ricks fucking rock at what they put their minds to. But—“

He was cut off by a busty nurse entering the room. 

“Mr. Sanchez! I’m glad to see you’re awake! And you have a visitor . . .”

Rick wondered what her response would be, seeing someone who looked like his twin sitting here.

The other Rick stood up. 

“I’m Ricardo,” he introduced himself. “Richard’s brother.”

“Oh! Nice to meet you. I just have to complete my rounds. Are you feeling okay, Mr. Sanchez? Do you think you’re up to eating anything today?” 

She efficiently checked the bags hung on poles and verified his IV catheter sites weren’t infected. She told him the doctor would be in later, and there may be a bandage change on his head. She bent over, collected the bag full of urine slung below him on the bed and told him she’d empty it and be right back. 

The other Rick watched her go. “I bet if your dick didn’t have a tube shoved up it, you’d wanna tap that.”

Rick fixed him with a dead stare. “And how exactly-how the fuck would you know that?”

“Because I sure would. Been awhile since I played out a nurse fantasy.”

Rick rolled his eye and was startled by how much it hurt. 

“Is your name really Ricardo?”

“No, asshole!” Rick hissed back. “But I knew you’d been checked in under Richard! Even these idiots would get s-suspicious if I said I was your brother and we both had the same name. Christ. You think I’ve never done this shit before?”

Rick couldn’t snap a reply; the nurse bustled back in with an empty bag. They stayed quiet as she reattached it, set a cup of ice chips within easy reach on a table, and reminded him to take it slow, since he hadn’t had any solid foods for a bit. She also told them visiting hours were until six, and it was nice to meet you again, Ricardo.

Then she left.

“I’m gonna see when her shift ends,” Rick mused, half to himself. 

Despite learning eye rolls resulted in pain, Rick did it again. “Just sit down and tell me the rest of this shit.”

Grousing all the while, but seemingly pleased he had a captive audience, Rick continued. Rick rested his head back on the pillow and let the recap of his life roll over him. When it got to the part about being dishonorably discharged again, though, he picked his head back up. 

“Why the fuck would I be charged with _murder?_ I was following orders!”

Rick shrugged unsympathetically. “Someone realized they made a-a mistake. Those orders weren’t supposed to be given. And they’re gonna need a scape goat, so guess what, Rick? Your neck is on the line. They’re gonna re-write your psyche profile as an off-kilter, dangerous man—it’ll cause an internal uproar, what with the idea a psycho could slip through the cracks and become a decorated SEAL, but that’s easier for them to deal with—with a grievous hate-on for the guy you shot. They’re gonna say you took your squad on an unofficial, unsanctioned mission, and they’re gonna hang you out to dry. 

“Like I said, the only future you have here is sucking on the muzzle of your gun.”

Out of all the information given to him so far, this was the worst. He couldn’t care about “Diane” because he never knew “Diane”. He did care about his career and his reputation, because that was his life. He’d given everything to the Navy, and now they were going to shit on him? Rick closed his eye again and bit the inside of his lip to collect himself before saying very quietly, 

“What about my men? They knew the order too. Are they going to be discharged?”

“Nope. They think you’re dead. Oh, did I forget to mention that juicy tidbit?” Rick said dispassionately. “Yeah. You’re already listed as deceased in the official records. Your squad thinks you didn’t make it out of surgery. Your discharge is post-mortem. Your ranks are gonna be stripped post-mortem. Your buddies? They’re going to be given a garbage bag full of unmarked cash to keep their mouths shut about the whole thing.”

Rick bit the inside of his lip harder at this, the harshest bit of news of all. The taste of blood spread over his tongue.

“So!” Rick said, clapping his hands together, like this had been a barrel of laughs. “Unlike the other fucknuts in this dimension, you have the opportunity to get the hell outta here! You haven’t even asked the big questions yet, Rick!”

“And what’re the big questions?” he mumbled back. His life was over. He truly didn’t care.

Rick leaned close again and grabbed his shoulder, too tightly. Pressed back against the pillow, Rick cracked open his eye again, and was met with an eerily familiar shit-eating grin. One that he’d given lots of other people, but never had the pleasure of experiencing on the receiving end. 

“You haven’t asked about the Citadel, and you haven’t even had the balls to ask about your goddamn eye.”

_tbc..._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains descriptions of eye injury. My info of the military may be inaccurate, but my knowledge of ocular trauma is not.

They were interrupted by a doctor, this time, and then lunch which one Rick grimaced at the look of and pulled a flask from an inside pocket and the other pushed away because he wasn’t sure he’d ever eat again, after hearing all the rest. 

Rick sold the Citadel like a sleazy time-share con artist: Gilded! Beautiful! Efficient! A utopia for Ricks—and Mortys—from all dimensions! He’d be free to live his life, secure in the haven created by Ricks, for Ricks. And it just so happened they needed Ricks with his skill set, to quickly and efficiently take out threats, so he’d have a job right away—

Rick looked him straight in the eye and demanded to know what the catch was.

Rick never faltered. “No catch, 707.” He even crossed his heart in a dramatic display. “I mean, there are some taxes to pay—what free state doesn’t have those, am I right?—and you don’t get a portal gun free and clear, but you didn’t have a portal gun here, so that’s not going to make any bit of difference to you!”

Another new term. Portal gun. He filed that away for later. 

“Enough about that shit, though. Let’s talk about not only what you can do for the Citadel, but what the Citadel can do for you.”

And here was where he learned the horrific news that his assault rifle had jammed, and the muzzle exploded in his face, destroying his right eye. Rick read the report from his notepad—it didn’t even surprise Rick any more that he had this information—with the same cool demeanor that he’d delivered the rest of the bad news.

Skin tattooing from gunpowder. 

Traumatic corneal lacerations from shrapnel.

Iris prolapse.

Complete cataract due to said shrapnel piercing the lens.

Lens capsule rupture.

Secondary uveitis brought on by lens material leaking into the anterior and posterior chambers of the eye.

Retinal hemorrhage. 

Retinal detachment.

With each thing listed, Rick grew more and more nauseous. Deep in that eddying pit, he knew the answer to his next question, but needed to hear it out loud.

“No s-saving my eye?”

Rick flicked another disdainful look in his direction.

“No, fucktard. There was no saving that eye.”

For the third time, Rick clamped his teeth into the flesh of his lower lip, to hold in his tears.

“You’re focusing on the wrong thing, here, Rick.”

This time when he looked directly in the other Rick’s eye, he was pissed off.

_“Really?_ You r-really think that I shouldn’t be focusing on the fact that my fucking eye is gone?! I shouldn’t be focusing on the fact that my fucking career is over, that everything is shit, and oh-oh, I don’t know, let me-let me repeat, _my fucking eye is gone?!”_

Like most of this conversation, Rick didn’t respond with compassion or sympathy. He snapped back, 

“Did I stutter, 707? Yes, you’re focusing on the wrong goddamn thing. Think about it! A city full of Ricks? We put our collective minds together, and there’s nothing we can’t do! You’re whining like a bitch about losing your stupid eye—you ever consider you can get a cybernetic one that’s a million times better?! Huh? No, of course you didn’t, you just wanna lay there and live in the fucking past, like those shits who eat those goddamn wafer cookies!”

“Of course I didn’t consider that you asshole!” Rick roared back. “All of this is brand-fucking-new information to me! How in the _fuck_ am I supposed to consider anything?!”

He could feel the blood pounding in his head. His blood pressure must be through the roof—who the fuck did this asshole think he was? This “Rick” just showed up and dumped all this shit in his lap . . . he was going to kill the cocksucker. He was going to kill this guy—

Monitors started alarming around him. That got Rick’s attention, finally. 

“Easy, man. Take it easy. You’re bleeding through your bandages—“

He could feel it. The fresh blood was warm on his cheek, even under the wrappings, and he automatically put his hand up to put heavy pressure on it. He kept his good eye—he needed to start calling it his only eye—on Rick.

“Man, you really look like you want to mess me up,” Rick chuckled. “And I believe you could, with your training and all. We need you Rick. You need the Citadel, and the Citadel needs you.”

Nurses and doctors rushed into the room then, pulled in by the alarms. They converged to stop the hemorrhaging, barking orders to the Rick on the bed to lay back and let them work. Someone told the other Rick to leave, but Rick on the bed snapped—nay, _demanded—_ that he wanted him to stay, that they weren’t fucking done yet. 

While the medical staff cut the bandaging from his head to assess the damage, Rick 707’s only eye never left his twin.

⁂

Resutured, rebandaged, and with a new bag of painkillers hung feeding him sweet sweet relief through his arm, Rick once again fought to remain awake while that asshole was still in the room. It was a losing battle.

“Cy-cybernetic eye, huh?” he asked sluggishly.

“The best the Citadel can offer,” came the reply. “Our doctors aren’t like these quacks in these dimensions. You’ll have to heal up first, though. The inside of your face looks like roadkill, and even Doctors Sanchez need to have some landmarks when they start implanting all the circuitry.”

He was exhausted. The pain was being chased down by the drugs again, but it left him weak. Still, a new thought crept in.

“Why do they . . .” 

Rick waited patiently, even as the words drifted off. 

“. . . why do they . . . need me, if all Ricks can be . . . enhanced?”

“Not all Ricks have your skill set, 707. Only a few in all the dimensions had the fortitude for SEAL training. You’re special.”

“Soundss great,” Rick slurred.

The Rick at the side of his bed grinned again.

“I knew you’d come around. Can’t beat the idea of enhancements. You’re gonna get so much pussy, man! Not only do they look fucking awesome and draw in the chicks like a magnet—from the infrared you’re gonna be able to tell when a woman is jonesin’ for you, so you never get turned down. I just need your signature here, here, initial here, since you’re military you don’t get assigned a Morty, but you didn’t have one to begin with, so it doesn’t matter, press hard, you’re making three copies, sign here—“

Try as he might, Rick couldn’t keep hold of the pen that’d been pressed into his hand any longer, and he tumbled down the long staircase of drug-induced unconsciousness again.

_tbc..._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little more eye surgery. Just FYI.

Rick 707 was collected by the DRR agent the next day. That Rick was accompanied by a kid—“This is my assistant, Morty, he’s helping me unhook all this shit they have on you and handling all the heavy lifting”—and after turning off his monitors and pulling all the wires and tubes attached to him, and loading the poor boy down with all the personal items that could be found in the hospital room, Rick was hustled through a swirling green doorway that he thought was a pretty good analogy for what was going on inside his head. 

He stepped from the hospital room into the Citadel, and the DRR Rick grabbed him by the upper arm to keep him from falling as he spun on his heel to take it in. It was more disconcerting seeing untold numbers of himself and that kid than the crazy architecture of the place.

“Time enough for all that gawping later, 707,” Rick told him drily. “You’re due back in a hospital bed.”

He was herded into the nearest building. A hospital, he was told, that had portal dampening in place, like that was supposed to mean something. Rick was triaged, some more forms were signed, and the other Rick wished him luck as he was settled into a wheelchair. Morty waved a little as he got wheeled away.

“Wait! I have to-I gotta—“

“What, Rick?” The orderly was a Rick, but the nurse was another Morty. 

“I owe that Rick some vodka! Will I see him again? How will I get it to him?”

Orderly Rick snorted. “You think we don’t h-have a fucking vodka delivery service here on the Citadel? Fuck man, you can send goddamn fl-flowers along with it to your boyfriend if you want.”

Nurse Morty was a little more helpful. “You just need his dimension number and the delivery service will find him.”

Rick sighed in relief. He didn't want to owe any Rick anything.

⁂

He settled into life on the Citadel as best as he could. It was still a little unsettling that most every citizen was him, although being in the military for so long eased that somewhat, since the point there was that everyone was pretty much the same too. He started wearing an eyepatch. It set him apart, and soon, like so many of them, he answered to that as readily as Rick.

The bigger problem was his fucking implant. 

He’d healed. He kept his strength up. He continued to train as best he could. When it was time for the cybernetic globe to be placed, however, it didn’t work. He’d suffered excruciating migraines. They removed it. Let him heal again. Brought in a specialist—a Rick who looked like he was more at home in a machine shop versus a hospital’s aseptic operating room. He rewired the receiver in Rick’s head. A new cybernetic eye was inserted. 

It continued to refuse to work. 

This time Rick got pixelated, ghosting images wandering through his brain, on top of the headaches. 

They sutured his eyelids closed over the cybernetic eye, so he wasn’t haunted by the information fed into his brain from it, let him heal again, then tried tweaking it. 

He had to be awake for those particular procedures, and that was hell on fucking earth. If they ever needed a new way to torture someone, he highly recommended it. An eyelid speculum was put in place, making it impossible to blink. They removed the cybernetic eye but left it attached, so when it did send images they were skewed and completely out of his normal line of vision. Trying to process what two different eyes were seeing, at two completely different vantage points—with one of them glitching, pixelating, and generally distorting the images—sent pounding waves of pain through his entire body, making him nauseous.  
As they tinkered with the wiring, it felt like they were pulling on the meat of his brain, as if tugging his frontal lobe closer to the back of his orbit was going to make a difference. 

He couldn’t see what they were doing, exactly, but he could definitely tell when they picked up a soldering iron to work on something in the small space of his eye socket. 

The smell of burning flesh came before the next stab of pain, localized in his face.

“You have to cauterize that bleeder,” one of the doctors advised another casually. 

“No shit, Sanchez!” the other replied, as he continued burning the tissue in the orbit. “Morty! Get a 20mL syringe of betadine solution and a 20mL syringe of sterile saline! I want this socket lavaged.”

With all the monkeying around in his head, Rick felt queasy again, but kept it under control as best he could. He answered their questions, when they asked, and let them work without complaint, although at one point he did question if every Doctor Rick Sanchez on the Citadel had to pass a psychological test to make sure they were sadistic fuckers before they got their license.

All the Ricks and some of the Mortys in the room laughed at that.

It didn’t matter. 

They couldn’t figure it out. The relays weren’t holding. His brain either refused to accept or interpret the images from the eye correctly, or the eye couldn’t properly send them to his visual cortex. Whatever the reason, the end result was the same.

No implant.

No enhanced eye.

He was left just a deformed Rick.

One of the doctors clapped him on the back at a recheck and told him there was always plenty of work as a garbage man. Someone had to clean up all the shit.

Rick seethed.

_tbc..._


	5. Chapter 5

He wasn’t officially kicked out of this Citadel’s military yet, although he knew it was just a matter of time. He had already earned grudging respect from some of the other grunts, so he thought that helped stay his discharge. He kept up his hand-to-hand combat skills, working against hard-light holograms and even other Ricks, when they were foolish enough to spar with him. 

Close combat wasn’t as much as problem as he expected it to be; there was some loss of peripheral vision on his right side, of course, but muscle memory and quick reflexes offset that. It wasn’t often an opponent surprised him with a move at his right, and even if it happened once, Rick made sure never happened again. 

However, his marksmanship, his pride and joy, did tank. No binocular vision meant no innate goddamn depth perception. That was a problem. But he was a Rick, and problems were made to come to heel. 

Rick spent as much time as he could, sometimes forgoing meals and sleep, at the shooting range. The glory of living here was that all weather conditions, all terrain could be simulated, just like he was in the field. He learned to judge distance by the sound the wind made, coming around a building or through trees. He took clues from the surroundings: how shadows fell, whether or not there was anything moving in his field of vision, and learned how to track it mentally.

The dark and dim lighting was the worst. With little to go on from the environment, he had to find another way to compensate. Luckily, another bonus of living here was access to a lab, a machine shop, and an electronics bay. The government obviously knew Ricks had an inborn need to build and create, so he was able to design and rig a special sight for his rifle with night vision technology that approximated distance for him. He hated the crutch, but he had no other choice. 

Finally, after a few successful but not-high-priority maneuvers, he was called into a commanding officer’s office.

“Sir?”

“At ease, 707. I was just looking over your records.”

Rick settled into a military ease as he answered, “Yes sir.”

“You were SEAL Team, back on your Earth?”

“Yes sir.” The question was pedantic; the commanding officer had all the information in front of him, and if he knew both Ricks and officers, it was already memorized.

The officer finally looked up at him.

“Too bad about your eye.”

Rick took a breath that was half a second too long before replying, “Yes sir. Thank you for your concern.”

He didn’t make it sound too snotty.

“Sit down, Rick.”

He certainly didn’t like the sound of that—using his name instead of dimension. He had no option but to obey, however, and sat. The officer tapped the papers spread out in front of him. 

“You were a good soldier, Rick.”

That sounded even worse. Past tense.

“You ranked high on all your aptitudes. Your missions were overwhelmingly successful—“

“I had good men with me,” Rick interjected quietly.

The officer raised his eyebrows. “—yes, of course. You received several medals and accolades. Exemplary service.”

This was sounding more and more like he was being discharged. His gut clenched although he worked hard to maintain a neutral expression. This fucking place. They offered so much, and now he was being thrown away like garbage. He should have stayed in his dimension and taken whatever outcome occured, even if it was a bullet in the brainpan.

“Yes sir.”

The officer glanced through the service records again, considered something, then said,

“Do you know why DRR sought you out, Rick?”

He thought back. “I was approached by a field agent and told the Citadel had use of my skills. That there was a SEAL Team here, just like at home, and I would fit in. Sir.”

The other Rick nodded, slowly. “Yes. Earth SEAL Teams are elite, but nothing like ours. Do you know why?”

Rick may have had an inkling, but this was a prime “officer strutting” opportunity and he wouldn’t presume to hazard a guess when the CO so obviously wanted to tell him. When the other man cleared his throat and gave him a conspiratorial smirk, he knew he wasn’t wrong to keep quiet. 

“Our SEAL Team is the best of the best. Comprised only of Ricks—no Mortys here—they represent our most highly trained, most efficient squad our military has to offer. They take the jobs no one else can. They complete the jobs no one else can. They’re expected to be at the top of their game, always, ready for any call of duty or assignment that is given to them.”

This was old news. Rick wondered, queasily, when the axe was going to drop.

“More than that,” the officer continued, “these are Ricks with no one. They never had a Diane—or if they did, she never got pregnant. Subsequently, there are no Beths or Mortys in their original dimension. They have nothing to lose, and no traction for an enemy to use against them. And they all voluntarily became SEALs in their original dimensions. They have the discipline and understand the rigors of serving in such an elite force.”

Now some of that was surprising. Rick looked at his CO with a little more interest.

“Do you know how fucking difficult it would be to train Ricks up to the level of SEAL if they hadn’t taken the responsibility for it on their own?” the officer barked, like Rick himself had posed the question. “It’d be fucking impossible! We’re all assholes, and trying to get them to even remotely listen would be worse than herding goddamn cats!”

Rick nodded along.

“So. You were SEAL Team in 707. I’ve been getting reports you’ve been keeping your skills up, and out on the range, you’re pretty fucking good. Pretty fucking good doesn’t quite cut it in our SEAL ranks, but I’m not going to let the opportunity of adding another of you pass by. 

“Come on, you’re going to their barracks.” 

⁂

He was taken to a barrack that was set apart from the others. The sergeant who led him over knocked on the door, loudly, then gestured towards it when a terse, “What the fuck do you want?” was shouted back. 

“Good luck, 707. You make it one night with them, and I’ll sign your transfer papers.”

Rick nodded to his escort, and went inside. 

_tbc..._


	6. Chapter 6

The four soldiers in the barracks were in the middle of a game of poker. He looked at them, they looked at him, and there was stunned silence, like they couldn’t believe someone would actually enter unannounced. 

“What the actual fuck?” the Rick with a shaved head asked. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Rick Sanchez, dimension 707. Former SEAL Team member on my Earth. I was recruited here to join you fuckers.”

One of them, with the more standard spikey hair, slowly stood up. Rick figured him to be in charge.

“Former SEAL Team on your Earth, huh? That don’t mean shit here.”

He walked around the table towards him. The others did the same. Rick stood his ground, even as Spikey Hair stepped into his personal space and inspected his face. Rick returned the gaze coolly. His breath stunk of stale booze, and his eyes were mismatched: one brown, the other with an iris so pale it could barely be distinguished from the sclera.

“I heard about you. Eyepatch. The Rick who can’t keep an implant. You have no depth of field. You’re useless.” Dismissively, Spikey Hair finished, “Get him out of my sight.”

That was all the rest of them needed to converge on him like the well-oiled machine they were. 

Rick was at least marginally better prepared for a brawl: he was wearing a uniform, which offered at least a little protection, and these guys were in various stages of undress, from only wearing a tank top and pants to shirtless to just wearing shorts. However, that’d give them plenty to grapple on him, but fewer handholds for him; he was going to have to fight dirty to come out of this.

Then he grinned wildly, because who went into a fight thinking it’d be a gentlemanly affair?

He ducked under the first thrown punch and bulldozed the Rick with cornrows who’d thrown it, striking him hard with a double shot: one in the solar plexus and the other to the front of his throat to shove him backward. Cornrows retched and stumbled backward, hand at his damaged throat. Mohawk, only in shorts, went for his knee but Rick twisted at just the last second and managed to deflect most of the blow. It hurt like a motherfucker, but didn’t incapacitate him. 

When that didn’t work, Mohawk grabbed his arm and rotated it up, trying to get his hand on the back of Rick’s neck and fold him into a half-nelson. Rick twisted again, couldn’t break the hold, and took a punch to his own diaphragm. 

It knocked some of the air out of him, and Shaved Head moved to do it again. Rick stopped trying to force his lungs to work and grabbed for the other guy’s head. Shaved Head laughed—no purchase there, cocksucker!—and Rick dropped his questing hand to the other man’s cheek, like a caress. 

Then he tangled his hand in Shaved Head’s beard and, using Mohawk’s mass to brace himself against, pulled the other Rick’s face down while he drove his knee up. He felt cartilage crack under the impact and he kicked that same leg, managing to catch Shaved Head in the chest and boot him backwards too. Blood splattered on the floor, leaving a trail in Shaved Head’s wake. 

Rick didn’t wait for the next person to step up. He threw his head rearward, but didn’t catch Mohawk by surprise. He must have done some damage with the reverse head butt, though; the other Rick cursed and spit at the back of his head. 

Pain bloomed back there too. He must have caught a tooth in his scalp. 

He roared and stomped down, hard on his captor’s bare foot, scraping the sole of his boot down the other man’s shin as he did. Mohawk snarled and his grip loosened. 

Rick spun out of the hold he’d been in, but even through the pain in his foot Mohawk grinned as he came around. His mouth was bloody; he looked demonic and bright eyed, like he was having the time of his life. The fleeting thought that maybe he looked the same passed through his head; then Mohawk descended with a flurry of punches that he had to concentrate to block and avoid. 

He held his own, and they both opened wounds on each other’s faces. Split lips, a mouse on a cheekbone, both of them laughing maniacally. Rick thought maybe he just had to outlast the other guy, and he could do that, he’d done it before, when fresh agony erupted in his lower back. 

He arched involuntarily, howling. Punches to the kidney were an absolute nightmare.

His back contracted. He tried to turn to meet this new attack and Mohawk’s next punch clipped him right on the sweet spot along his jaw that threw black spots into his vision.

Shaved Head thumped his kidney again, and he dropped. He curled inward automatically, to protect his vitals, but just as quickly as they’d started, the other three backed off. 

Rick was hauled to his feet, even though he couldn’t support himself well.

Through a rapidly swelling eye, he saw he’d managed to at least injure the other ones too. Cornrows looked pretty green from the blow to his larynx. Shaved Head had an obviously broken nose and two black eyes from the force he’d used on his face, and Mohawk looked like he’d fought a wolverine: split lips that were still ginning, a couple of chipped teeth, one black eye and bruising all along his face from jawline to brow. 

Spikey Hair looked well put together and mildly amused.

“You’re fun,” he told Rick, and drove both fists full force into his stomach.

Blood erupted out his mouth along with the rest of his breath, and he dropped again, gasping for any tiny bit of oxygen his spasming diaphragm would allow. 

“Pick him up,” Spikey Hair ordered, in a bored tone.

Held upright again, the double punch was repeated.

All his insides felt bruised and mushy. He was no longer capable of making any noise, because he was no longer capable of drawing any breath.

“Pick him up,” he heard again.

For the third time, he was lugged erect. Once there, he struggled mightily to put both feet flat on the ground and look Spikey Hair as directly in the eye as he could.

Spikey Hair flicked his eyepatch. 

“You have no _depth perception,_ asshole. You’re fucking useless on this team.”

“I can . . . I can out shoot you, prick,” Rick wheezed.

Everyone exploded into laughter. 

“I saw . . . saw your r-records,” he continued, barely hearing himself over their mirth. _“Mine fucking beat yours, and I’m fucking blind in one eye.”_

Spikey Hair stopped laughing with a speed that made it scary. “You think you’re better than me, cripple?”

It hurt to move too much, but Rick lifted his head again. “In this area, fucking _yes._ You need me on this team.”

Spikey Hair narrowed his eyes. Rick wanted to tense for the next punch he knew was shortly coming, but all of his muscles had given up the ghost and refused to do what he wanted. He hung bonelessly from the two supporting him.

“We don’t need another blind guy with unilateral vision on the team,” Cornrows interjected. 

Spikey Hair turned to Cornrows. Rick moved his head enough to see him too.

 _“Another blind guy?”_ Spikey Hair roared.

“He has fucking _heterochromia,_ dickwad!” Rick spit, at the same time.

Everyone seemed to stop for a moment. 

“What?” Cornrows asked.

“Fucking heterochromia!” Rick repeated with a snarl. “He’s not fucking _blind,_ he has _two goddamn different colored eyes!”_

Mohawk started laughing again. It sounded more like true laughter, not something because he was caught up in the heat of the moment, beating the shit out of a guy. After another moment, Shaved Head did too. Their grips on Rick slipped and he pitched forward.  


Spikey Hair caught him. In between his own barely contained chuckles, he helped Rick to a chair. 

“Where’d you get _that_ guy?" Rick asked.

It sent them into peals of laughter again, while Cornrows tried to defend himself—my field of study was thermodynamics, not goddamn useless biology! he insisted—which only lead to further ribbing.

Mohawk made his way to Rick’s chair. “You okay, Eyepatch? I didn’t think you could look worse, but I managed it. You’re gonna be pissing blood too, for a few days, with those kidney shots you took.”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine—“ he started to answer. 

“We’ll get over to the med bay. They’ll fix you up in no time,” Spikey Hair interrupted. He gestured to Cornrows, who continued to try and downplay his mistake. “Maybe we’ll ask the Medic Mortys running the place this time of night to run an MRI on you, see if you actually do have a brain in there.”

Shaved Head, holding a dirty tee-shirt cupped to his broken nose, clapped him on the shoulder. “Welcome to the team, man.”

Rick tried to smile through the agony. 

“Tell us about not being able to get an implant. That’s shitty for you—you must have some pretty rare Sanchez genetics to reject it. I don’t know of any Ricks that can’t get at least one—“

“Wait,” Rick interrupted. “You all have cybernetics?”

“Of fucking course! That’s why we’re so impressed with you—not only did you hold your own, you took some heavy duty blows from some enhanced hands and arms! Christ, didn’t you know?”

Rick shook his head, and thought that if he had, maybe he wouldn’t have been so keen on jumping into a brawl with them. 

“You’re something else, Eyepatch. Something else. Come on, let’s go get you fixed up.”

Rick was helped to his feet and lead out the door by all of them.

Trial by fire, and he came through the inferno on the other side scorched but okay. It still would take a bit of time to gain the trust and build the tight-knit camaraderie he’d had before, but he had his team again.

He had his purpose again. 

_fin._


End file.
